index
Our sense of exile
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Life separated (Sergels Torg in Stockholm)
Life alone (Riccardo Bofil's Temples du Lac, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France)
There is no denying our sense of exile. Living with rapid change, in places non-concentric and discontinuous, does weaken the sense of being rooted in one place. However, there is a prescription, and it is more, not less, complexity and more self-awareness in the process of inhabitation, going forward into greater density. If we are more consciously involved with our own processes of change, we can be, if not at home, at least reconciled in our tensions and negations insofar as we see them as part of the process that is ourselves. Locality is a moment in the process, not dissolved but not self-sufficient. There is a spaciousness about our inhabitation that forbids solid identity. None of this, though, stops us from working to combat the many concrete exiles and oppressions that can be ameliorated by communal effort. There is nothing in the basic conditions of place making to oppose such efforts, and much in today's places that can be mobilized to resist the oppressive effects of automatic systems and and of groups that wish to simplify our inhabitation for their own gain.